﻿HOLMES] AMERICAN ARCHEOLOGY AND HUMAN HISTORY 4'3 



urements were taken of all, and masks were made of such as could 

 be induced to undergo the unpleasant ordeal. 



What I now desire to say does not have to do with what Amer- 

 ican archeologists or the American Government have done for 

 archeological science, but rather with what prehistoric America has 

 contributed and may be expected to contribute in the form of ma- 

 terials of human history. 



The importance of archeology to the student of history is now 

 fully recognized. The science is establishing its claims to consider- 

 ation more fully year by year, especially since it has become allied 

 with geology, which furnishes the necessary time scale, and with 

 paleontology, which supplies the scale of life. The branch of in- 

 quiry which only a few years ago dealt with isolated fragments of 

 knowledge, with disjointed parts of the framework of human his- 

 tory, now essays to aid in building up the entire skeleton of that 

 history, and, with the aid of the allied sciences of ethnology and 

 psychology, in clothing it with the integuments of a living reality. 



America is taking a noteworthy part in this rehabilitation of the 

 race and, fortunately, is most helpful just where the Old World is 

 weakest. In America the past of man, for the most part at least, 

 connects directly with the present and with the living. Each step 

 backward along the course of culture development proceeds from a 

 well established and fully understood base, and there is thus no 

 baffling gap between history and prehistory, as in the Old World. 



In America all the steps of culture, from the highest to the lowest, 

 within the native range, are to be observed among the living peoples, 

 and we are thus able to avoid many of the snares of speculation 

 with respect to what men have thought and men have done under 

 the greatly diversified conditions of primitive existence. 



In America the conditions are simple. The antiquities of a 

 region represent in a large measure the early history of the known 

 peoples of that region. There have not been the successive occupa- 

 tions, the racial interminglings, the obscuring and obliteration of 

 phenomena that so seriously embarrass the student of the ancient 

 nations of the Old World. The stone age and the red race stand 

 practically alone within the field of study. 



In America the high-water mark of culture barely reached the 

 lower limit of civilization. In the Old World the representation of 

 man's career is fuller above than below that limit, so that America 

 can be expected to assist, especially, in building up the substructure 

 of human history ; it can be expected to furnish a fuller reading of 

 the early chapters of culture progress than any other part of the 

 world. 



